Bill Donohue: 'Professional Thugs' Give Ferguson Bad Name

"Professional thugs" are whipping up racial tensions in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the fatal shooting of a black teen by a white cop, says Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

"I worked in Spanish Harlem, a very rough neighborhood, in the 1970s. I loved the black and Puerto Rican kids there," Donohue said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

"Unfortunately, a lot of black and Puerto Ricans and others get a bad rap because of a handful of people the media will then take and blow up. Even Ron Johnson,[captain of the Missouri State Highway Patrol now] the head of the police [in Ferguson], said, 'Listen, a lot of these people are coming in from California and New York.'

"I want the media to investigate who's coming in from other states. How did they get there? Who's coordinating? Who's paying for them? That's a story there. These are professional thugs."

Donohue also tore into the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil-rights activist and MSNBC host, who flew to Ferguson days after the incident.

"Where is Al Sharpton in Chicago? Where was he in New York, his own hometown, last weekend when 14 people were shot, two of them dead? Black-on-black crime doesn't excite him. White-on-black kind of violence does,'' Donohue said.

"What matters is that people, in particular young men, are busy killing each other and we've got to put an end to it."